The Nature of Knowledge

It would be wrong to say that Information is Knowledge.
It is also wrong to say that Knowledge is Intelligence.

So the question that plagues the more psychologically-focused philosophers remains: How do we know anything? What is "knowing"?

Consider: When Literacy was introduced, people did not say "the book says..." They said "The Truth of the Book is..."

This fits in with the legend of King Thamus, as told in Plato's Phaedrus, which states:

..this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

This runs counter to what many of us think of when we think of literacy--we believe that the information contained in writing can be "reassembled" into knowledge, which can be properly used with intelligence. To the ancients, this would seem like idiocy: If we don't know facts, ourselves, how can we be said to know anything.

This is the old "New Media are Evil" reaction--epitomized by the distrust of television, rock 'n' Roll, and the Internet. (Perhaps "Reductio ad New Media?")

But we can't say that there is no such thing as knowledge or intelligence, anymore, or that we are less intelligent and knowledgeable than our forebears. Instead, I would argue that we're more distributed. Knowledge isn't composed of "facts" anymore, but of the processes necessary for acquiring the desired facts.

A knowledgeable individual might have access to a larger number of individual facts than the average person. Nowadays, though, "knowledgeable" is getting closer to "intelligent": better able to correlate facts and discover new ones, able to allow the sum of what they know be greater than the individual facts that they hold in their memory.

(Note to self: Cease trying to be clever when using the words "New Media.")

Puzzles

I, like a number of you others out there in internet-country, am going into finals this week. I'm overworked and feel as if I'm entering the last, long stretch of a grueling race.

I usually try to choose subjects which complement one another--one of the benefits of Jesuit Education is the emphasis on epistemological interconnectivity. That is, the Jebbies like to think that there's a lot of crossover in between the various subjects. I wasn't sure I believed in it until I put a copy of the T-distribution diagram into my notes for Phenomenology.

It wasn't a fluke--I discovered that the bell-curve shape t-distribution was a perfect graphic match for the Phenomenological (specifically Husserlian) conception of time as it relates to human observers.

For those of you who are having trouble with this, I want you to think of a bell-curve, draw it out if you'd like. Divide it vertically through its tallest part. On the furthest right side, write "THE FUTURE." On the furthest left side, write "THE PAST." on the vertical line going right through the middle write "NOW."

If you were to remove the bell-curve shape, you'd have the standard idea of time. An axis stretching from what was to what will be, along which we move; a filmstrip that passes through our minds showing us the world around us.

This is not time.

Mentally add the bell-curve again. On the right slope of the curve write "protention" with a right-pointing arrow, and on the left slope write "retension" with a left-pointing arrow.

We protend--that is, we expect, we assume--that which has not happened yet. The dropped plate will fall to the floor; its destruction is protended more weakly, being further in the future, happening "after" the fall.

We retain--which is not to say that we remember--that which has just happened; we may or may not remember it at some point in the future, but it has not yet quite faded from our minds.

This has very little to do with the t-distribution, which is a tool for extrapolating probability based on the results of data taken previously. But the occurrence of that shape--the cresting wave that is, for me, both "Now" and "might be"--struck me as a fascinating occurrence.

Perhaps I'm just seeing illusory correlations, but they seem to be significant in some way, if not outright meaningful. And if they are not significant in the outside world (as the shape of the wave is not significant in the outside world) they are epistemologically significant, being inherent in the way people structure their knowledge of the world and of ourselves.